While Mack takes a summer break, we bring you this treat from the archives: the full-members-only version of his 2024 interview with beloved audiobook narrator Robin Miles. This episode features almost an hour of additional content, including our What’s Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! To get access to all our members’ content, past and future, become a member at mackhagood.com.

This episode is a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with an acclaimed actor, casting director, audiobook narrator and audiobook director. Miles has narrated over 500 audiobooks, collecting numerous industry awards and, in 2017, was added to the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. She’s the most recognizable voice in literary Afrofuturism, having interpreted books by Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. 

Miles holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She has taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country and she has an amazing talent for doing accents—something we really dig deep into on this podcast. In this conversation we talk about technique, the audiobook industry, and the politics of vocal representation. How do we avoid the misrepresentation of marginalized people on the one hand and vocal typecasting on the other?

Cited Media:

Books:

Plays:

0:00 Intro & preamble
4:51 Guest intro: Robin Miles
11:03 Teaching acting
17:00 Script marking technique
20:48 Character switching & IPA
24:08 The IPA explained
25:19 Vocal colors & authorship
27:53 Physical embodiment of text
35:54 Nalo Hopkinson deep dive
40:56 Roles in audiobook production
51:44 Broken Earth & sci-fi voicing
1:12:09 Politics of representation
1:16:33 Recording gear & software
1:19:44 AI vs. human narration
1:30:08 Writing & narrator matching
1:45:16 What's Good

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While Mack takes a summer break, we bring you this treat from the archives: the full-members-only version of his 2024 interview with the influential theorist of noise and affect theory, Dr. Marie Thompson. This episode features 40 minutes of additional content on Thompson’s research on tinnitus and hearing loss. To get access to all our members’ content, past and future, become a member at mackhagood.com. 

Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect. 

Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We’ll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox. And if you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry—we break it down!

Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems.

Cited Media:

Books:

Articles / Journal Pieces:

Journals:

Chapters:

0:21 Intro
5:17 Introducing Marie Thompson
7:57 Liverpool music roots
10:38 PhD at Newcastle
14:55 Defining noise
20:38 Spinoza & affect
39:44 Materialism debate with Cox
47:57 Tinnitus
1:09:04 Tinnitus & ableism in sound studies
1:13:11 Normate listening
1:23:57 Closing thoughts
1:24:22 What's Good segment

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Today we talk radio, podcasting, and democracy with Jason Loviglio. Jason is an expert on the history of National Public Radio and a key theorist of how audio media have changed the public sphere. He traces the politics of radio down to the smallest details, like the kinds of mics that are used, the way radio personalities use their voices, even the fan mail that comes in.

In this episode, Jason Loviglio discusses everything from FDR's fireside chats to the politics of NPR to his new book, Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling, the first full-length book on This American Life. He argues that TAL was designed from the start to function as an empathy machine, but over the years, the politics of that empathy have changed substantially.

Jason Loviglio is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Jason is the author of Radio's Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass Mediated Democracy. He's the co-editor of Radio Journal and he has edited three different volumes on radio.

Cited Media:

Books:

Podcasts / Radio Programs:

Essays / Speeches:

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
5:15 Intimate Public
10:35 FDR's Radio Voice
17:00 Radio & Affect
27:41 NPR's Origins
39:31 This American Life
44:40 Ira Glass's Formula
52:59 Empathy & Its Limits
1:02:27 Podcast Explosion

To read the full transcript click here.

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Today we’re doing one of our occasional episodes where host Mack Hagood talks about a new essay he’s written for our newsletter “Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive” Mack writes that students and professors are struggling, both academically and spiritually. He tries to diagnose the issue he felt in his classrooms this year and the role technology may play in it.

For new listeners, Mack is a writer and researcher who studies sound, technology, and culture. He is the author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, a book on noise-canceling headphones, white noise, tinnitus, and the ways people use sound to manage modern life. He is currently writing a new book for Penguin Press, and he also hosts this podcast Phantom Power, where he interviews artists, scholars, musicians, and sound designers about the invisible power of sound in everyday life. Besides all that, Mack is a university professor and that’s what his most recent essay is about.

Click here to read the newsletter for free.

Cited Media:

Film:
Mary Bronstein - If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

Books:
Ben Lerner - Transcription (2026)
Mack Hagood - Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (2019)
Hartmut Rosa - Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)

Newsletter/Essay:
Mack Hagood - Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive (2025)

Lecture:
Amar Bose - MIT Lecture on Engineering

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
1:58 The Essay & Its Response
3:13 ARFID as Metaphor
8:38 University Pressures & AI
9:50 Student Disengagement
14:05 Feed Logic & Screen Time
16:30 Ultra-Processed Communication
29:50 Student Doubleness & Motivation
36:05 Resonance vs. Control

To read the full transcript click here

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Today  we talk to modular synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani and MIT Spatial Sound Lab researcher KamranV. Suzanne and Kamran both love quadraphonic sound, and they have a new quad release coming out on June 4th called Ciani/Orkest. They are on a mission to make quadraphonic music accessible to both musicians and to listeners, and in this interview, Kamran will explain how, you, with no special equipment, can listen to their new album in quad.

We'll also get into how analog synthesizers actually work, the early history of Buchla synths versus Moog synths, why Suzanne thinks keyboards diminish the potential of synths, and how Suzanne designed some of the most recognizable sounds of the 1980s.

Suzanne Ciani is a Grammy Award nominated composer, electronic musician, and neoclassical recording artist who has released over 20 solo albums, including Seven Waves and The Velocity of Love. Her work has been featured in Hollywood films, video games, and countless commercials. She was inducted into the first class of keyboard magazine's Hall of Fame, alongside Bob Moog, Don Buchla, and Dave Smith. And she was the subject of the feature documentary, A Life in Waves.

KamranV is an arts technologist and MIT Spatial Sound Lab researcher, and he's a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. He's worked at Interscope Records, produced immersive music releases for Nine Inch Nails, Sting, and Beck, and he ran the music tech fest, Moogfest. He's also on the board of dublab.

Cited Media:

Music & Albums:

Film & TV:

Events & Festivals:

Tools & Plugins:

Record Labels & Archives:

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
5:45 Meet the Guests
6:28 Sound Design & Commercials
13:45 High Art vs Low Culture
19:03 Ciani Orkest
24:42 Moog vs Buchla
26:36 How Modular Synths Work
36:15 Quadrophonic Sound
45:13 The QUARK Plugin
50:24 Seven Waves

Click here to read the full transcript

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Today, we look at some of the hidden labor that creates the ubiquitous music that we hear all around us.

Today we talk to Nessa Johnston and Jamie Sexton, co-editors (with Elodie A. Roy) of Anonymous Sounds, Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s. It's the first scholarly book that takes a comprehensive look at the early off-the-shelf music industry that soundtracked TV, movies, radio, and commercials and it argues that these anonymous individuals had a major collective impact on the music of the era.

This show is part of a series of occasional episodes and newsletters about the roles that music and sound play in public space.

Nessa Johnston is lecturer in screen studies and digital media at the University of Liverpool.

Jamie Sexton is associate professor of film and television studies at North University.

If you'd like to hear the full version of our conversation, including their reading and listening recommendations, you can become a member at http://mackhagood.com.

Cited Media:

Articles / Essays:

Anahid Kassabian - "Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity" (2013)

Ryan Bradley - "It’s the Music You Hear All Day, Without Ever Noticing" (New York Times Magazine, 2026)

Philip Tagg - writings on library/functional music

Books:

Nessa Johnston, Jamie Sexton & Elodie A. Roy - Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2024)

David Hollander - Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music (2018)

Simon Reynolds - Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2011)

Films / Documentaries:

The Library Music Film (2018)

Music:

Luciano Michelini - Frolic (1974)

John Pearson - Heavy Action (1974)

Barry 7 (of Add N to (x)) - Connectors series

Luke Vibert - Nuggets

Podcasts:

Phantom Power - The Lost Sounds of Silent Cinema: Vaudeville, Magic Lanterns, and Movie Palaces w/ Rick Altman, and Eric Dienstfrey (2019)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:49 Ubiquitous Music
4:27 Meet the Guests
5:01 What is Library Music
6:54 Early History
13:35 Taste & Anonymity
27:47 The '60s & '70s Boom
32:22 Name that Tune
38:24 Crate Diggers & Sampling
45:30 AI & the Future
49:51 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

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In the fall of 2001, an obscure experimental musician decided to revisit some analog tape loops he had made back in the early eighties. Inspired by the work of Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp, William Basinski had created his own distinctive practice of taping easy listening music off the radio, cutting the tape into loops, roughly a foot long, and then slowing it way down.

The result transformed music into something profound as these brief loops of time became capacious ambient spaces. William Basinski's, eighties creations anticipated coming trends in loop based production, noise, ambient and slowed, and reverbed music, but very few people were paying attention at the time.

Then in the summer of 2001, Basinski decided to digitize some of his favorite loops from his 1980s archive, and that's when everything changed. As he played the old tapes back, the magnetic ferrite that had captured the music began flaking off the plastic backing of the tape. The very act of digitally preserving the tapes was also destroying them.

Basinski could hear the sound of decay, the death of an old medium captured by a new one. Grounded in decades of art practice, Basinski recognized what he had and he knew to stay out of the way, adding just a bit of reverb, but otherwise letting the tapes sing their swan song. The resulting tracks became known as The Disintegration Loops, and he finished them right as the events of September 11th unfolded.

From a rooftop in Brooklyn, he videotaped the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers, and then he synced the video to the music he had just made. The Disintegration Loops is regarded as one of the most important artworks associated with 9/11. It's part of the permanent collection of the national September 11th Memorial and Museum.

The record received glowing praise in The Wire and Pitchfork and Basinski became one of the most influential figures in ambient and experimental music. And now 25 years after the disintegration loops creation, William Basinski is on an American tour to mark the anniversary, and I'm thrilled to have him on the show today.

We talk about the tour, his sonic practice, his surprising childhood as what he calls a NASA brat. His background in classical jazz and rock music, our mutual love of shortwave radio, and even his amazing fashion sense.

Click here to find more information about William Basinski’s upcoming tour.

Cited Media:

Steve Reich - It's Gonna Rain (1965)

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians (1978)

William Basinski - Shortwavemusic (1980s)

William Basinski - Water Music (self-released)

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops (2002–2003)

William Basinski - September 23rd (reissued ~2024)

William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch (1959)

Pitchfork - Disintegration Loops review by Mark Richardson

Chapters:

0:42 Intro & Background
4:28 The Tour
6:02 NASA Brat
11:42 Classical Training
12:36 Music School & Influences
15:14 San Francisco Years
26:36 The Disintegration Loops
29:29 Release & Reception
34:30 Shortwave Radio
37:12 Fashion & Style
39:30 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

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Do fish have ears? What is the nature of underwater hearing and how does it differ from hearing in the air? If humans are the evolutionary descendants of ocean creatures, do we retain any fishy traces in the way we hear the world? And what about all the noise we humans make in our oceans? If we want to save the planet, do we need to learn to listen like the fishes once again? Today we explore these questions with Marine biologist and bioacoustics expert Dr. Sophie Nedelec.

Nedelec has a PhD in bioacoustics and behavioral ecology from the University of Bristol. She is a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow of the Royal Society and he's a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter. She researches underwater sound, sensory ecology, and human’s sonic impacts on the environment and sustainability.

Speaking of oceans, today marks a bit of a sea change here at Phantom Power: the addition of occasional “SOS” episodes on the Science of Sound with co-host Dr. Nathan Morehouse. Nate's an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, where he also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS), an interdisciplinary research institute focused on sensing, perception, and sensor technology development through adventurous integration of insights from the sciences, engineering, humanities, and arts.

Cited Media:

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - "Particle Motion: The Missing Link in Underwater Acoustic Ecology" (2016)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Motorboat noise impacts parental behaviour and offspring survival in a reef fish (2017)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Hormonal and behavioural effects of motorboat noise on wild coral reef fish (2020)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Soundscapes and living communities in coral reefs: temporal and spatial variation (2015)

Machine Listening (Sean Dockery, James Parker, Joel Stern) - Environments 12 (2023)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:52 Meet the Guests
1:42 Introducing SOS Episodes
4:25 Do Fish Have Ears?
9:29 The Otolith Explained
12:44 The Lateral Line
26:29 Particle Motion: The Missing Link
34:57 Protecting Marine Life
36:58 Boat Speed & Noise
45:06 Reef Restoration with Sound
49:23 Noise Cancellation Underwater
54:52 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

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Why does a sixty-year-old media theory resurface in the media every few years, while journalists ignore the great communication scholarship that has emerged in the meantime? More importantly, what effects does antiquated thinking have on the public understanding of our current digital discontent? In this episode, Cameron Naylor interviews our usual host, Mack Hagood, about his recent newsletter, “Oral Residue: A Zombie Media Theory Rises Again.” Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong believed that all of human history is dividable into three eras: the oral, the literate, and the electronic. However, this kind of “Great Divide” thinking has long been criticized by scholars who study oral communication, literacy, media, and sound. In this episode we talk about the good, bad, and ugly of McLuhan and Ong’s long legacy.

Cited Media:

Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy (1982)

Raymond Williams - Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)

Derek Thompson - Plain English (podcast episode with Joe Weisenthal) (2026)

Jonathan Sterne - The Audible Past

Harold Innis - works on communication theory

Eric Havelock - works on orality and literacy

Gerard Manley Hopkins - Poetry

Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey (8th century BCE)

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction

0:44 Episode Overview

3:20 Introducing Mack Hagood

4:14 First Encounter with Ong

8:52 Discovering McLuhan

17:25 Why McLuhan Keeps Returning

25:49 Critiques of the Great Divide

33:36 The Ear as a Source of Terror

37:40 Closing Thoughts

38:33 Outro

Click here for the full transcript.

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Creativity doesn’t come out of thin air–it evolves in relation to the communities around us and the tools available to us. Some of the most common forms of everyday creative works–memes, podcasts, vertical videos–barely existed a couple of decades ago. And obviously, we can’t ignore the changing economics of creative industries, which wield an outsized influence over what kind of work gets made.

Today host Mack Hagood talks to legendary podcast executive Julie Shapiro’s about what it means to be creative in the year 2026, particularly from an audio perspective. Given their shared history in 20th century indie music scenes, they also talk about the ways that indie music and fan culture shaped them–and how practices like zine making shaped the internet as we know it.

But does the current shape of the internet promote good creative work and a fulfilling life? In this frank conversation, Mack and Julie discuss the challenges of making a living as a creative and doing fulfilling work when the digital system does its best to prevent those things.

In our members-only version of the podcast, Mack and Julie discuss the turn to video podcasting and in  the What's Good segment, Julie suggests some incredible podcasts to listen to, as well as things to do and to read.

Cited Media:

Nancy Baym - Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018)

Nigel Poor & Earlonne Woods - Ear Hustle (Radiotopia/PRX)

Nathan Heller - The Battle for Attention: How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age? (2024)
Tumi Magnússon - Voyage There and Back (2015)

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:27 Mardi Gras and Mobile Sound

13:47 Indie Music Origins

26:15 DIY Ethics and Community

30:32 Being Broke vs Career Pressure

44:37 How DIY Became the Internet

57:47 Returning to Creative Roots

01:05:12 The Podcast Industry Crisis

01:22:32 Information vs Experience

01:31:21 Making Work in This Moment

Click here to read the full transcript

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